Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2020 i Mother Jones

In November 2017, Emily Isaac packed her belongings and flew to Texas. More specifically, to the 21st Congressional District, gerrymandered to include half of San Antonio, a scoop of Austin, and a large rectangle of Texas hill country, where a Bernie Sanders acolyte named Derrick Crowe was running for Congress. “We did all of the right things,” says Isaac, who had spent six months as a field organizer on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Crowe’s team built a massive door-knocking operation “dwarfing what our opponents were doing in terms of volunteers.” Isaac expected Crowe to win, but he came in third. “I left feeling like, ‘Wow, did any of that move the needle?’” she says. “That’s when I realized voters at the door will tell you whatever you want to hear…

Andrea Reusing, a James Beard Award–winning chef, has dozens of decisions to make about how to keep her employees and customers safe when she reopens the patio of Lantern, her popular Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant. One item on her worry list: guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that encourages restaurants to use disposable dishes and cutlery to cut down on germ exposure. She cringes at the thought of all those utensils, dishes, napkins, and tablecloths flooding the landfill. Her industry has always faced a “big packaging nightmare,” Reusing says, but now, “it’s painful.” Just how painful is hard to say—it’s not clear exactly how many restaurants have switched to disposables. But extrapolating from pre-pandemic studies of California restaurants, a midsize restaurant with 30 seats went through…

Eighty-year-old Dennise Whitley was born and raised and still lives in Norway, a 5,000-person town in southwestern Maine where her family has resided for more than 100 years. Her grandfather and father worked in its once-thriving shoe manufacturing industry, in a factory that, like so many across New England, has closed. “And right now I’m making a Maine blueberry pie!” she tells me when we speak over the phone in August. Whitley says that she and her family “are very good Democrats—and always have been,” even though Oxford County, part of the 2nd Congressional District, which covers nearly 80 percent of the state, is “quite Republican.” But, much like baking with the state’s prized blueberry crop, Whitley has long participated in another proud Maine tradition: crossing party lines for “many,…

Clipboard in hand, Magda Morales politely approaches people waiting for the bus in downtown Tucson to ask if they’ve signed up to vote. The city’s sweltering transit hub is decidedly less bustling than it was pre-pandemic, but still noisy enough that she has to speak loudly through her white surgical mask. “Hi mija, are you registered to vote?” she asks a young Mexican American woman awaiting a transfer. “I’m only 17,” the woman responds quietly through her black cloth mask. “I turn 18 in October.” “Oh mija, but you can register if you turn 18 before the November election. Wanna register?” Morales asks, sitting on the opposite side of the bench, trying to keep a safe distance. She pulls out a voter registration form and asks the young woman for…

I remember hearing the shot and turning my head just in time to watch the aluminum tear gas canister slam into my brow and forehead. Like ripples in a puddle the impact rolled through my eye, instantaneously detaching my retina. It was the eye I used to create, to document, to share—a photographer’s eye—but now all I could see through it were dancing shards of light on a background of emptiness. I was near Lafayette Square in Washington, DC, photographing the protests in May that had erupted in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. But my mind immediately went to Chile, to the work I had done there a year before, to the dozens of eyes I saw destroyed during protests in that country. In that moment I…

Back in March, as coronavirus cases were just beginning to surge and cities were locking down, chef and globe-trotting disaster-relief activist José Andrés called for a federal mobilization to combat the coming “economic catastrophe” and the twin scourges of rampant unemployment and hunger. Andrés, who had moved to the United States from Spain in 1991, looked to the Great Depression for inspiration. He pointed to a past effort to create jobs amid an economic meltdown: the Works Progress Administration, a cornerstone of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. “Today we need a WPA to feed America,” Andrés wrote in a New York Times op-ed. In the months after his prophetic appeal, the jobs market cratered and government income support fell drastically with the expiration of the CARES Act. The crisis…

Before there was a United States of America, there was a postal system. Revolutionaries like Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson hatched their plans using underground postal networks known as committees of correspondence. In 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress created the Post Office Department and named Benjamin Franklin the first postmaster general. American democracy expanded with the postal system, one of the only institutions that bound the new nation together and aimed to serve the many rather than the few. The Post Office Act of 1792, signed by George Washington, heavily subsidized the mailing of newspapers, laying the groundwork for an informed citizenry. It also made it a crime for the government to interfere with the mail. When the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville visited…

You need a story. That’s what they say, anyway. You need sympathetic characters, a villain, some violence, maybe a dramatic escape. That’s what it takes to gain asylum in the United States. You need lots of other things, too—a principled Border Patrol agent, a competent asylum officer, a good lawyer, a fair-minded judge—but before any of that you need a story, something that can be fitted into the rapidly narrowing margin of American benevolence. You need a man, say, draping his arm around your shoulder, telling you, “We are watching you.” That’s where the story of Gaspar Cobo Corio and Francisco Chávez Raymundo might begin. “We are watching you,” the man said out of nowhere. “You didn’t even notice that I have been following you. This was not just today.…

One winter night in Oakland nine years before a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, Raheim Brown and his friend Timesha Stewart, both 20, were smoking weed in a Honda, hazard lights blinking. It was 9 p.m., and two cops who had been patrolling a school dance near Skyline High School approached the car. They were Barhin Bhatt and his partner, Jonathan Bellusa, both sergeants with the Oakland School Police Department. At the time they did not know the Honda had been stolen. They would claim they decided to investigate because they thought the car was parked in a strange spot. Pretty much everything that happened next is still in dispute. Bhatt walked up to the driver’s side, where Stewart was seated, and began speaking to her. Brown told…